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M&M Moments: Clean Slate

We recently bought our twin girls, Mattie and Macie, a set of cheap magna doodles. My wife purchased them at a local store for three dollars. The girls loved them. Mattie especially loved hers and she wanted to take it everywhere she went. She held it while she ate, took in the car and she even took it to church. She would cry if we took it away.

If you’re not familiar with the magna doodle, it is a drawing board that utilizes magnets to create an image with a special magnetic pen. As you move the pen along the surface of the board, tiny magnetic particles come to the surface to form the image you are drawing. The image can quickly be erased by sliding a plastic handle from one side to the other. Then you have a clean slate on which to draw.

The girls loved to sit in my lap and scribble on the magna doodles. I would try to draw silly characters and faces for them, but, before I could finish, they would always scribble on my drawing or move the lever to erase it. They never seemed to let me finish.

This simple story reminds me of a lesson The Lord taught me while I was having my devotions. I was studying in Exodus and ran across this passage:

“And the Lord said unto Moses, Hew thee two tables of stone like unto the first: and I will write upon these tables the words that were in the first tables, which thou brakest. And be ready in the morning, and come up in the morning unto mount Sinai, and present thyself there to me in the top of the mount. And no man shall come up with thee, neither let any man be seen throughout all the mount; neither let the flocks nor herds feed before that mount.
And he hewed two tables of stone like unto the first; and Moses rose up early in the morning, and went up unto mount Sinai, as the Lord had commanded him, and took in his hand the two tables of stone.” – Exodus 34:1-4

The Lord had given the children of Israel the law written by the His own finger on tablets of stone. When Moses came down from mount Sinai to present the law, he was horrified to find Israel worshiping an idol that they had constructed. They had broken the very laws Moses came to give them. Moses threw down the tablets and destroyed them, and God judged His people.

Being a God of second chances, The Lord told Moses to chisel out two new stones and bring them up the mountain where God could write the law on them again. Moses went to God with a blank slate.

This is a perfect picture of our fallen nature. We come to God with prayers and petitions and He lays His will and way on our hearts, and, before we know it, we’ve broken God’s laws. We want our way and our agenda accomplished and seldom do we sit in the lap of God and receive His instruction. We never let Him finish. Just like my twin baby girls, we paint a primitive picture of how we want our life to be. We fail to wait and let the Divine Artist finish His masterpiece.

We need to come before God with a blank slate. We need to leave behind our selfish wants and ambitions and sit at the feet of the Master and receive His instruction. As we yield the pen, He will paint a picture more beautiful than we can conceive. Let us lay aside our list of petitions and open our ears to the wants and desires of our Heavenly Father.

Eventually, the magna doodles broke. The pens lost their tips and the handle didn’t work right anymore, and the girls have moved on to playing with other things, but I’ll never see a magna doodle again without thinking of the lesson of Moses and his blank slate. May we always come before God in this manner.

“But he said, Yea rather, blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it.” – Luke 11:28